He thought of Drizzt, then, and of Catti-brie and Bruenor. It would be grand to see them again, of course.
But he thought of Eiverbreen and Pericolo and of Donnola—yes, mostly of Donnola!—and of all that he had come to love about his life here in Delthuntle.
The halflings of Delthuntle had been good to him, and to Eiverbreen. Even before Regis had signed on with Pericolo Topolino, he and Eiverbreen had known kindness from fellow halflings.
And to think that here, in this city of tall and hardy men, a halfling like Pericolo could rise to such stature and prominence! Even the more formal thieves guilds in the city, including the most powerful of all, the Three-Fingered Ring, an organization known to frown upon any lesser guilds, afforded Pericolo and his halfling Morada great respect. Regis himself had witnessed the respectful bows of the Delthuntle Lord’s Guard, the Hobgoblins, whenever Pericolo Topolino walked past them.
The halflings of Delthuntle were not treated as curiosity pieces, or lessers—whether that was because of Pericolo, or an attitude that had helped facilitate Pericolo’s rise.
“A good halfling community,” he said aloud, though he was speaking to himself and not to Eiverbreen.
The older halfling heard him, though. “What’s that?” he asked.
“A good halfling community,” Regis stated more loudly. “Here in Delthuntle, I mean. As good as any I have ever known.”
That brought a curious look from Eiverbreen.
Regis laughed at his own foolishness. As far as Eiverbreen was concerned, Delthuntle was the only place Regis had ever known!
Regis nodded, though he was not looking at Eiverbreen, and not even hearing the actual words as the older halfling pressed him on the point. He was considering his unexpected status, and to his surprise, he found that it was no small thing. Here in Delthuntle, halflings were not second class, and here in Delthuntle, he personally was not the tag-along. Far from it! Here he was the protégé, growing strong and skilled under grand tutelage.
His thoughts careened to a lonely mountain rising into a starlit sky on the northern tundra. That image had been so prominent in his thoughts on that day he had walked out of Iruladoon. He had never imagined how difficult this twenty-one-year journey back home would prove to be. When he had walked out of Iruladoon, he merely thought that he would bide his time, training, always training, and would return to the Companions of the Hall as if nothing had ever interrupted their heroic journey.
Not so, he knew now.
He looked at Eiverbreen, who needed him.
He thought of Pericolo, who had taken him in and shown him great kindness and opportunity.
He felt again the softness of Donnola’s kiss.
Not so, he knew now.
Regis couldn’t reason his way out of it. He couldn’t pretend it had never happened, and he couldn’t even sublimate it by reminding himself of the higher purpose this second chance at life had given him.
He thought about it when he went to his bed at night. He dreamed about it.
He thought about it when he woke up each morning.
He tried to attribute it to youthful exuberance, but even if that were the case, it didn’t seem to matter.
No, that kiss from Donnola had overwhelmed Regis; in both of his lives, he had never experienced anything quite like it. But the lingering taste of it wasn’t all joy for the halfling as he pondered it through the hours and days, for there were things about Donnola …
Four days after the incident, he readied for his daily sparring match with his instructor. Donnola came in smiling, in a grand mood. She lifted her blade and tipped it in salute.
But he dropped the tip of his rapier to the floor and shook his head.
“Are you troubled?” Donnola asked, similarly dipping her blade, and wearing an expression of honest concern.
“Why did you kiss me?” Regis asked bluntly, unable to contain his unease.
Donnola fell back a step, as if she had been slapped. “What?”
“You kissed me,”
“You kissed me back!”
“Of course I did! You’re beautiful!” Regis lowered his gaze as he felt his cheeks blushing.
Donnola’s laughter followed him, and finally he looked back up.
“Thank you,” she said, and dipped a curtsey, and she, too, was blushing.
“But why?” Regis asked.
“Why what?”
“Why did you kiss me?”
She started to answer, but Regis’s expression turned dark and he continued, “What did you hope to gain from it?”
Donnola fell back another step, but then came forward aggressively, dropping her blade and putting her hands on her hips. She stood barely inches from Regis, staring at him coldly.
“You cannot be mad at me!” Regis insisted. “You have shown me—you have taught me! You have taken me to those noblemen’s grand parties and shown me how you use your charms to manipula—”
Donnola’s hand came up faster than Regis could react, and slapped him hard across the face.
She huffed and swung around to run away, but Regis caught her by the shoulder and tugged her back around, throwing himself at her. And when they crashed together, he hugged her tightly. He saw the moisture in her pretty brown eyes, and kissed her.
She twisted to get away. She pulled her mouth back. But Regis pressed in harder and rejoined the kiss and Donnola’s tension gradually melted away, and then she was kissing him as passionately or more.
“Do you doubt me?” she asked, and she twisted suddenly, dropping them both to the floor, her atop him.
“Have you never kissed any of them? Isn’t that part of the game you play?” Regis asked.
Donnola’s brown eyes flashed with anger, but it passed quickly, and with a burst of laughter, she said, “Aye, they like the little ones like us, you know. It makes them feel so big and strong.”
“So you have kissed a Delthuntle lord or two!” Regis cried, clearly feigning outrage, and with a sudden burst, he rolled Donnola onto her back.
Donnola smiled up at him, her moist eyes twinkling in the sunlight streaming in through the room’s lone window. “Aye, that’s the tease, and aye, I have,” she admitted, and with a sudden twist, she rolled Regis onto his back. “A kiss and a tease and nothing more,” Donnola insisted. “And nothing more ever, with any … until now.”
The sun was long set, the moonlight streaming in through the window, when Regis awakened in Donnola’s arms. He felt the fool for ever doubting this amazing halfling lass. She was playing no game for him; her feelings were honest.
As were his own.
But lying there in the dim light, Regis couldn’t help but think of Drizzt and the road to Icewind Dale.
It had all become so very, very complicated.
CHAPTER 18
THE CHARMING NET
The Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR) Netheril
THE STARS TWINKLED, A CLEAR DESERT SKY, AND THE SLIVER OF A MOON cast a thin glow over the woman’s private garden, but enough of one for the moistened soft petals of her many flowers to sparkle like the stars above.
Catti-brie was in a fine mood—how could she not be when she felt so close to Mielikki?
Her days of dancing in Iruladoon, of communing with the goddess, had taught her so much about the ways of the celestial spheres and the eternal cycle of life and death. And the goodness of life, taken as a whole. She was part of those stars above, she understood, as were the flowers before her.
She was at peace.
And yet, she was not, for this place, this moment, reminded her of why she had returned to Faerûn, and of the task before her, in not so many years. This day, the spring equinox of 1479, marked her sixteenth birthday, or “re-birthday,” as she had privately named it. She had spent some hours with Niraj and Kavita in the Desai encampment, and she was not due back at the Coven until the next morning.
“Five more years,” she whispered to a flower before her. She lifted the plant’s wide and soft petal
s and gently brushed them. “Only five.”
She conjured an image of Drizzt in her thoughts, and she smiled widely. She had been gone from him for just over sixteen years by her measure, but more than a century in his lifetime. Had his feelings faded for her? Would he even remember her in any meaningful way?
Would she find him happily married, to an elf perhaps, and raising children of his own?
The woman shrugged, not happy about the possibility, but accepting it as just that, a possibility, and one that she could not control. She thought of seeing him again, of his smile, of his touch. How she missed that touch! Many things could seem trivial to Catti-brie now that she had been in the arms of a goddess, now that she had looked at the multiverse with such profound understanding. But Drizzt’s touch was not one of those trivial things; their bond seemed as large as that of the celestial spheres, and as eternal as the cycle of life and death, no matter the interfering practicalities.
If Drizzt had another wife, then so be it. Catti-brie knew that he still loved her, that he would always love her, as she would always love him.
She would be no less dedicated to the coming battle Mielikki had described to her in her days of communing with the goddess in the enchanted forest. If Lady Lolth or her minions came for Drizzt, they would have to fight through Catti-brie to get to him!
She pictured Kelvin’s Cairn in Icewind Dale, under a sky as sparkling as this one, the unending wind tossing her hair, the chill breeze tickling her skin.
“Five more years,” she whispered again.
“Five more years for what?” came a sharp voice behind her. Catti-brie froze in place, smile vanishing, eyes going wide. She knew that voice, too well! “For what?” Lady Avelyere asked again. “And do face me, child.” Catti-brie took a deep breath.
“Your magic is no match for my own, child,” Lady Avelyere said, as if reading her thoughts. “And you’ll not shapechange fast enough to be away from me.”
Catti-brie slowly turned around. Avelyere stood at the entrance to her secret garden, dressed in rich traveling robes of purple and white, and she seemed taller to Catti-brie at that moment, much taller and more imposing.
“You lied to me,” she said quietly, but each word resonated in Catti-brie’s mind as if it had been shouted into her ear.
“No, Lady …,” she stammered.
“I took you in, opened my house to you, and you lied to me,” Lady Avelyere insisted. “No …”
“Yes!”
Catti-brie swallowed hard.
“You didn’t know where your power of healing and shapeshifting came from, you told me,” Lady Avelyere went on. “You didn’t know that they were divinely inspired or different at all. But you have deceived me all along, worshiping this … god?”
“Goddess,” Catti-brie managed to say.
“I spared your parents!” Lady Avelyere screamed at her. “A mere word from me about their magical activities and Shade Enclave would have captured them and tortured them in the town square. And this is how you repay me? By lying to me?”
She swept forward as she spoke, moving very near to Catti-brie, staring down at her from on high.
“This does not concern them,” Catti-brie stammered, rising, but keeping her head bowed. The thought that Avelyere might take out her wrath on Niraj and Kavita horrified the woman—how would she be able to live with herself after bringing such ruin on those wonderful people?
But a comforting thread wove into her mind then, an assurance that Lady Avelyere would do no such thing, that Niraj and Kavita were not Avelyere’s concern and would not be exposed.
Catti-brie looked up at the woman. Lady Avelyere reached out a hand and gently stroked Catti-brie’s thick hair. “Oh, dear girl,” she said, her voice as smooth as the flower’s petal. “Do you not understand that I have come to love you as if you were my own daughter?”
“Yes, Lady,” Catti-brie heard herself replying.
“I’m merely wounded, truly wounded, that you did not trust me with your secret.”
“I didn’t think you would understand.”
“Faith, child, faith,” Lady Avelyere cooed. “I am your mentor, not your enemy.” She drew Catti-brie to her side and looked all around. “Tell me about this place. It is your shrine to this … goddess, yes?”
“Mielikki,” Catti-brie whispered.
“Yes, well do tell me more. Surely you have been blessed by her! I have seen the marking.”
Catti-brie’s hand reflexively went to her opposite forearm, to the unicorn-shaped spellscar she carried.
“Your spellscar, yes, and the powers it affords you,” Lady Avelyere said, though Catti-brie noticed that Avelyere had not even looked down or followed Catti-brie’s inadvertent movement.
“Tell me of it. Tell me of Mielikki,” Lady Avelyere purred. “And tell me of this dark elf and the mountain under the stars.”
Had she been of her reasoning faculties at that moment, Catti-brie would have understood that Lady Avelyere had garnered much more information than she could surmise by the garden, for Catti-brie had not spoken openly of Drizzt, had merely thought of him and pictured him.
“Tell me, Ruqiah,” Lady Avelyere prompted.
“Catti-brie,” the disciple of Mielikki corrected.
Lord Parise Ulfbinder sat in his grand chair, his hands together and before his pursed lips. He didn’t blink as Lady Avelyere poured forth the wild claims of young Ruqiah of the Desai.
“She is Chosen of Mielikki,” Parise said a long while after the diviner had finished her lengthy tale.
Lady Avelyere could only shrug. “It would seem.”
“And you believe her?”
Again the woman shrugged, but this time she added a nod.
“A Bedine child, a Chosen of Mielikki, who is not a Bedine goddess?” Parise asked skeptically.
“But she says she is not a Bedine child,” Lady Avelyere said. “She claims her name is not Ruqiah, but Catti-brie.”
It was Parise Ulfbinder’s turn to shrug, for the name meant nothing to him.
“A woman from another time, before the Spellplague.”
“That is quite a claim. Is it not more likely that she is merely trying to protect her outlaw parents?”
“So I thought,” Lady Avelyere replied. “But her claims—”
“Desperate claims for a desperate young woman …”
“She was adopted by a dwarf in this previous life,” Lady Avelyere interrupted. “A dwarf king.”
The end of his intended sentence caught in Parise’s throat. “A dwarf king?” he asked instead.
“King Bruenor Battlehammer of Mithral Hall,” Lady Avelyere explained. “She told me this under my charm dweomer, under a spell of hypnosis, under the power of magical suggestion.”
“She completed the concocted story,” Parise argued.
“There is record of such a king in the library of Shade Enclave.”
“So the girl visited the library.”
“And a mention of his adopted daughter, Catti-brie—”
“So the girl went to the library!” Lord Parise Ulfbinder shouted.
“—who was taken in the night by the ghost of Mielikki’s unicorn,” Lady Avelyere talked over him.
Parise fell back in his chair and meekly asked, “What do you mean?”
“This human daughter of King Bruenor, driven mad by the Spellplague, died in the night and was spirited away from her bed by a celestial unicorn, so goes the legend.” She paused and painted a wry grin on her face. “Away from the bed of her dark elf husband, Drizzt Do’Urden.”
Lord Parise Ulfbinder was among the most composed and dignified men in Shade Enclave, but the gulp and squeal that issued forth seemed more the cry of a startled child. He leaped up, his chair flying out behind him.
“A name you have mentioned before, yes?” Lady Avelyere said, grinning wider still.
“This is madness,” said Parise, rushing and stumbling around his desk to take a seat on it right before the woman. “Are
you sure that you have not mentioned this name to her? Perhaps you inadvertently put her on the road to concoct this wild story!”
“I don’t know that I have ever spoken that name before, or heard it, other than in this very room.”
“But the child is magical. Perhaps she has slipped an insidious dweomer past your guards and read your thoughts.”
“That would be quite a scouring. I do not concern myself with the dark elf. I did not even recall the name until Ruqiah—until Catti-brie spoke it to me, and even then, it barely sparked recognition. It was not until she mentioned this Drizzt creature’s race that I even recalled our long-ago conversation about Lord Draygo’s drow prisoner.”
“His lost prisoner.”
“We may find him, then, for this child is determined to find him sometime after the Year of the Awakened Sleepers. Indeed, she has fellow conspirators in this, who she intends to rejoin on the night of the spring equinox in that same year.”
“Bedine conspirators?”
Lady Avelyere shook her head.
“1484,” Lord Parise mumbled. “Five years, almost to the day.” He scratched at his goatee. “Interesting indeed.”
“What do I do?”
“Let her go!” Parise cried immediately. “And watch her, every step. We may witness a battle of Toril’s goddesses, and what a sight that will be!”
Lady Avelyere didn’t openly respond to that, but her expression spoke volumes, most of all revealing her relief.
“Why Lady,” Parise said teasingly, “you have come to love the girl.”
Lady Avelyere rocked back on her heels and considered the words. Her first impulse was to staunchly deny the accusation, but she quickly put that aside and honestly searched deep within herself. “She has such promise and skill,” she replied. “A curiosity and a hope, from her earliest days.”
“It is more than professional curiosity,” said her friend, who knew her well.
Lady Avelyere nodded.
“You think her a protégé.”
“Thought,” Lady Avelyere was quick to reply, correcting the tense. “Now I understand that is impossible. Her loyalty is not to me and never has been.”
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